One of the biggest challenges for successful start-ups is the growing pains that come with scaling. Meeting customer demand is a problem many struggling entrepreneurs actually wish they had. But, once you get over the hurdle of building brand awareness, keeping up with the demands can be daunting.

When you’re just starting out, your team consists of passionate, happy warriors who believe in your cause and/or the lucrative future of the business. As you start recruiting from the broader labor force -- whose primary motivation is a bi-weekly paycheck -- finding great additions to the team can become a real challenge. It doesn’t help that according to some reports, the hiring process is taking twice as long as it did just a few years ago; 23 days, on average, after the initial interview.

So, if your firm is going to spend at least a month trying to find someone to fill a position, you need the best candidates possible. The last thing you’ll want to do is repeat the process a few months down the line. Give the person with HR responsibilities in your organization four major attributes to seek out. To be honest, three out of the four in a single candidate is still a pretty big win.

Local

Cost-effective

Passionate

Experienced

Local employees who are passionate will be hard to find, but could prove more beneficial to the brand over the long-haul and represent a lower up-front investment. Local employees who are cost-effective can be found, but the churn rate is going to be higher. Or, you can broaden your net to find passionate hires that are cost-effective, but you’ll likely need to relocate them, or offer a telecommuting option.

The unicorn in hiring is an experienced recruit that is already nearby, willing to accept a wage that is below the market average and is passionate about your mission. These take the longest, and in many cases they’ve proven too elusive.

The recruiting process increases the cost of delivering quality products and services to the consumer, while at the same time decreasing the focus on the customer.

Reaching the ideal candidate.

It doesn’t take a mathematics degree to understand that the more people who see your job listing, the higher your chances are of actually finding the perfect candidate. The internet is a powerful tool for getting the word out, but the problem is that everyone knows about it. More than 427,000 resumes are posted on Monster.com every week.

It just isn’t possible for a single listing on a single site to capture all of that volume, or even stand-out and reach every potential candidate for an SMB’s open position. To understand how SMBs are competing in this environment, I reached out to an old friend with first-hand experience helping SMBs connect with future employees.

Adam Seabrook, the co-founder of Betterteam, offered these words of advice: “The online employment field is changing by the minute. The ability to reach and post jobs to more than 100 job boards with a single platform is a game changer for SMBs, and it’s something they clearly value, based on the popularity of our tool. We’ve seen how the recruiting process can be shortened to days, instead of weeks, by amplifying the visibility of an SMB’s job posting.”

Online job postings are a great tool, but they need to be given their time in the light. There’s a lot of competition out there for eyeballs. To quickly reach the perfect candidate, a job posting needs to be featured everywhere and anywhere.

Give your HR team the guidance they need to focus their efforts. The four attributes I laid out earlier have been used by my team to successfully find candidates. The more noise you can make with a well-defined target in mind, the faster and more reliable your recruitment efforts will become.

Ahmad Raza

Ahmad Raza is the creative head behind Samurais.co, a design and branding agency. His passion for finding creative strategies to convey complex ideas has manifested itself in more than seven years of successful business experience. Raza&rsq...

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